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This article addresses the question of whether and how internal wars can lead to state building. I offer a new conceptual framework for understanding the varied effects of internal conflict on state capacity, as measured through taxation. Contrary to the general scholarly consensus that internal wars make states fail, I hypothesize that like external wars, internal wars can lead to increased taxation when they enhance solidarity toward the state among the elite and motivate the state to strengthen and territorially expand the tax administration.

I critique Glenn’s article on settler colonialism and Bonilla-Silva’s article on critical race analysis from Indigenous perspectives, including racial genocide and world-systems analysis, to cover five centuries of global systemic racism during the conquest of the Americas, by Spanish and English colonizers and United States imperialism. I also propose macro-structural, comparative-historical analysis of racism including the destruction, resistance, and revitalization of Native Nations and American Indians.

The author makes the argument that many racial disparities in health are rooted in political economic processes that undergird racial residential segregation at the mesolevel—specifically, the neighborhood. The dual mortgage market is considered a key political economic context whereby racially marginalized people are isolated into degenerative ecological environments.

The American Sociological Association signed on to a letter with 287 U.S. business, science and engineering, medical and health, and higher education organizations urging Congress to swiftly complete action on the FY 2017 appropriations process and to include robust investments in scientific research.

A modified version of Monopoly has long been used as a simulation exercise to teach inequality. Versions of Modified Monopoly (MM) have touched on minority status relative to inequality but without an exploration of the complex interaction between minority status and class. This article introduces Gender Stratified Monopoly (GSM), an adaptation that can be added to existing versions of MM as a step toward such a conversation. I draw on written student reflections and observations from five test courses over two years to demonstrate the effectiveness of GSM.

Author of The Sociology of Money (1994), Nigel Dodd advances the current fascination with “media of exchange,” from his position at the London School of Economics, by wisely entering sustained dialogue with Marx and Simmel, as well as with many lesser lights from more recent times. This finely produced volume sports all the appurtenances nowadays expected of the serious monograph: comprehensive scope in digestible prose, plentiful footnotes, endless citations to, and dialogue with, other scholars’ works, and a splendid bibliography in reduced font (pp. 395–420).

Political-economy, which conceptualizes space as a resource over which different groups struggle, has long been the dominant perspective in the study of urban conflict. However space is also a cultural object from which actors derive particular meanings. In order to understand how meaningful interpretations of space give rise to urban conflict, this paper examines the architectural expansions of two Toronto museums.

Ironically, even though fossil fuels provided substitutes for the main uses of whale oil, the rise of fossil fuel use in the nineteenth century served to increase the intensity of whaling. The connections between fossil fuels and whaling are an example of the unanticipated consequences that frequently come with technological change. I draw on political-economic theory to explain why fossil fuels served to escalate rather than eliminate whaling.

First published in Paris in 1972, Marxist Thought and the City is the latest collection of urban writings by the French social thinker Henri Lefebvre to appear in English translation. The book is a close reading of the largely fragmentary urban reflections in the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. While it is written a bit like a comprehensive exam, Lefebvre manages to turn this simple exercise into a vibrant book of contemporary (and still fresh) urban theory.

Johanna Bockman unpacks a hefty term, neoliberalism. She cites its roots and its uses, decoding it as a description of a “bootstraps” ideology that trumpets individualism and opportunity but enforces conformity and ignores structural constraints.